Word: amuck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...movie, a marauding mollusk would probably be played by a giant clam. But the real-life monster swimming amuck in the Great Lakes is a tiny creature the size of a fingernail. With its jaunty brown stripes, a solitary zebra mussel looks cute, not threatening. The trouble is that the animal is anything but a loner, and its tendency to form colonies of thousands, even millions, makes it threatening indeed...
...poor against the rich. He tried to crack the global economic sanctions imposed against him by making a hasty and generous peace with Iran. And he attempted to exploit anti-Americanism, always a potent force, by casting U.S. intervention in the gulf as a case of Yankee imperialism run amuck...
What fuses this apparent chaos into a coherent and haunting play is the theme that runs through all of Reddin's work, notably Rum and Coke (1985), Big Time (1987) and Nebraska (1989): the tandem dangers of run-amuck individualism and nice-guy uninvolvement. The central character in Life During Wartime is, like almost all of Reddin's heroes, a genial but morally weightless young man. When he learns that other salespeople in his home-security firm are running a sideline in burglary -- for the loot and to generate additional sales -- he assumes it has nothing to do with...
...then it was too late. The accordion proliferated like the South American killer bee, joining the family of base instruments that includes the comb and tissue paper, the bagpipe and the exhaust pipe. Today an estimated 75,000 accordionists can be observed running amuck across the U.S., competing in squeeze-offs. In self-defense, they are banded together in associations presided over by the likes of people named Big Lou. It would not surprise anyone to learn that a certain Big George laces himself into the accordion harness and knocks out a couple of choruses of Boola Boola when...